There came a moment early during the evening when I, and I’m sure many other close Oscar watchers, thought the foregone conclusion of The King’s Speech winning Best Picture might not have been so foregone after all. At the beginning of the show, Tom Hanks presented the first two categories, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography, mentioning an odd, mostly irrelevant statistic: no film had won those two categories as well as Best Picture since Titanic. The first envelope opened and Art Direction went to Alice in Wonderland. Then Cinematography went to Inception. So much for that.

Danny Boyle is an effective filmmaker who perhaps knows a little too well that he’s an effective filmmaker. Sometimes his effects veer into self-consciousness. That is the case in 127 Hours, his followup to his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a film that demands the guiding hand of a strong and confident director, taking place as it does in a single setting for most of its running time: the canyon where adventuring hiker Aron Ralston was trapped for nearly a week in 2003 before amputating his own arm to escape. Boyle’s flourishes work when they evoke Ralston’s mental state, but did we really need POV shots from inside his water bottle?